The principles behind The Living High Street
The Living High Street is our plan to save the UK’s big retail brands with people-led change — transforming the role they play on the high street, and enabling their people to innovate and collaborate.
We’ve committed to some specific ideas to make The Living High Street ‘real enough to feel’. But those details are entirely hypothetical, and will all change once exposed to feedback from consumers and colleagues. What should remain though are the important principles behind the ideas…
The right kind of innovation
Too much retail ‘innovation’ focuses on putting screens (like ‘smart mirrors’) into otherwise standard formats. This doesn’t solve real problems for anybody.
What’s needed instead is to start from first principles. Going back to consumers’ and communities’ unmet needs, and thinking imaginatively about how to meet them — in a way that also presents a real commercial opportunity, and that the big retail brands have the capabilities and the cultural willingness to do.
The new store formats we’ve outlined are not techy, but they do use ‘digital thinking’ like collaboration and openness, and behind the scenes they are powered by the plugging together of off-the-shelf technology and smart use of data analytics.
For example:
- Each new store format can be reconfigured to suit different day parts, creating reasons to come to the High Street throughout the whole day and evening.
- Brands see each other, and local businesses, not as competitors but collaborators. They choose their store format that complements the others on the high street, and that gives a platform to local SMEs.
- Off the shelf SaaS technology is used to enhance the physical retail experience, for example through pre-booking, pre-ordering, and joining up with online preferences and subscriptions.
People-led change
Digital transformation without digital culture will fail. Which is why much of our emphasis is on people, and how they are empowered to do the right thing (rather than what a process or org chart limits them to).
For example:
- Leadership in each store are empowered to use their expertise and instinct to customise their offer to local needs.
- Each store’s leadership cooperate with their counterparts from other brands on a daily basis, coordinating events and sharing knowledge with the goal of creating a better, more coherent destination (from which they will all prosper).
- The local council are a key player in this collaboration. Instead of passively approving (or disapproving) plans, they are actively involved in the planning, and it is they who hold and drive the vision for what kind of high street they want to see for their town (to differentiate from and complement the high street in the next town along).
Please share The Living High Street within your organisations and beyond, so that the CEOs of high street retailers hear about it. Of course we’d love to be part of making this happen — but more than that, we want to see it happen.
Read more:
- What is The Living High Street?
- A day on Living High Street for a working parent, a local business owner, a high street store manager and a local council rep
- How M&S, WHSmith, Zizzi, TSB, Thomas Cook, 3 and Yodel can empower their people to save the UK high street
- How to make Living High Street real?
Albion is a creative transformation partner. We’ll work alongside your teams, empowering them to work in new ways, design new services, and unlock new growth. If that interests you, please get in touch with our CEO: jenny@albion.co.
